Did you know that there were 9.8 million mothers in Canada (including biological, adoptive and stepmothers) in 2011? Check out Statistics Canada’s Mother’s Day in Canada for more information about this special day… by the numbers.
On April 14th, Ryerson Library hosted the annual Student Staff Appreciation Party and recognized our Student Employee of the Year Award recipient. The Student Employee of the Year Award recognizes students who have achieved excellence in their work environment, and the winners receive an award as well as a cash gift. Again this year, the selection committee had a difficult time choosing just one recipient, and ultimately recognized two Ryerson students: Carlene Jacob, and Andres Hernandez.
This event also recognized graduating student employees Andres Hernandez, Mehak Saini, Marjan Hajipour, Bertha Lee, and Slimane Bakelli, who each selected a book to be added to the Library collection.
Congratulations and best of luck in the future!
The Library is pleased to provide access to Oxford Bibliographies Online – Cinema & Media Studies. The bibliographies are a carefully organized, thoroughly peer-reviewed account of the most important books, articles, and websites relating to cinema and media studies.
Connect to Oxford Bibiographies Online – Cinema and Media Studies
Oxford Bibliographies Online (OBO) is an entirely new research tool for the social sciences and humanities. A scholar-curated library of discipline-based subject modules, OBO is designed to help busy researchers find reliable sources of information in half the time by directing them to exactly the right chapter, book, website, archive, or data set they need for their research. Each entry is a selective guided tour through the key literature on a topic, receives multiple peer-reviews as well as Editorial Board approval, and is designed to facilitate a research experience with no dead ends. All citations are linked through to your collection via OpenURL, full-text via DOIs, or to the web via links to OCLC, WorldCat, and Google Books, allowing users to locate quickly full-text content directly from OBO. OBO is the ultimate collection development tool for librarians and time saving tool for students and researchers.
PQDT Global now includes citations and often full text access to PhD dissertations and Master’s level theses from universities in the UK and Ireland, adding to its strong coverage of North American and European graduate research.
All dissertations published after mid-1980 include author supplied abstracts. Brief abstracts are available for masters theses published since 1988. Most of the content created after 1997 is available in full text and selective earlier works are also available in full text. Millions of other works created prior to this period and as early as the 17th century are discoverable from bibliographical citations. And the database continues to grow with around 700 universities continuing to contribute new content to this database.
Many universities, including Ryerson, are populating local open access digital repositories with their graduate students’ dissertations, theses, and in some cases, major research papers. The open access movement seeks to make scholarship available to users without charge rather than limiting access to those who can pay subscription and purchase fees. Many tools promote the discovery and access to graduate students’ research. Examples include Open Access Theses and Dissertations, DART-Europe E-theses Portal, and Google Scholar. For more suggestions visit the RULA Theses and Dissertations Research Guide.
That GIF above wouldn’t mean much without those captions. So you can imagine how frustrating it would be to watch an entire video with the sound off – especially if it’s mandatory viewing for your class. This is a situation that we’re working hard to prevent for students across our campus.
The Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL) has recently published the ROAM report on how we can increase accessibility to our media collections. As a member of OCUL, the Ryerson Library is committed to making classroom materials accessible. We work with students, faculty and Academic Accommodation Support to caption videos and online video clips. We’ve also taught ourselves how to caption with free software like YouTube and Amara.
So if you’re a student, staff or faculty member interested in making videos, please caption! We’ll give you some advice on how to get started. Contact us on how to caption to make your content more awesome!
For more information, please check out our captioning program.
On March 17th, the Toronto Metropolitan University Library & Archives and Ryerson Aboriginal Student Services are hosting a workshop on the Library’s new Aboriginal Research Portal. Created by Jamie Morin, RASS Peer Supporter, the Research Portal contains great resources on aboriginal topics and traditional knowledge. We’d like to show you the portal and how you can use it to conduct research for your assignments. We also invite the community to help build and expand the Research Portal. We would love to hear your feedback and gather some advice on taking the Portal to the next level!
You can check out the Portal here.
Food will be provided and there will be a draw for Tim Horton’s gift cards.
When: March 17th
Where: POD 250
Time: 5:30pm-7:30pm
No need to RSVP!
Kelly Dermody is a Librarian for Accessibility Services & E-Learning at Ryerson Library and Archives.
Jamie Lee Morin is a 4th year student at Toronto Metropolitan University, studying English, French, and Aboriginal Knowledges and Experiences. She currently works at Ryerson Aboriginal Student Services as a peer supporter. During the summer of 2014 she collaborated with Kelly Dermody to create the new Aboriginal Studies Portal. She is Metis, with her community based in Maniwaki, Quebec.
This week is Open Education Week!
What is Open Education? It is an educational movement that is committed to producing teaching resources that can be used and then reused by other educators without formally seeking permission. In this model creators of educational content freely release their materials to the public. Other educators can then deliver the material freely to their students, as long as they attribute the original creator. These resources are most commonly made available under Creative Commons licences. Many MOOCs, open courses, and regular classes now routinely use this kind of content, because there is no need to get copyright clearance and they can be publicly posted on the web.
Open textbooks, like open courses, are created by experts and then made freely available to the public. Projects like the BCCampus OpenEd textbook initiative and the OER Commons give instructors a way to find free-to-share material, and great resources like the Creative Commons search can help anyone find free to use images and music.
Toronto Metropolitan University Library & Archives is hosting a few events this week to celebrate Open Education Week 2015.
Tips for Finding Free Music, Images, and More: Drop-In
Today 12-1 pm, March 9th, Student Learning Centre (SLC) Rm 515
Find free music & images and more to use in your projects – both commercial and school based. This is a drop-in session.
Is there a Free Textbook in Your Future?
12-1 pm, March 10th, 2015, Student Learning Centre (SLC) Rm 514
Can you imagine a world were some of the textbooks that are used to teach courses you take are free? Find out more about the Open Access Textbook movement.
The Affordable Classroom: Open Access Textbooks (LTO and the Library)
12-2pm March 12th, 2015 POD-372
Do you ever worry about the rising cost of textbooks for your students? Are you interested in hearing about possible alternatives to the traditional textbook model, like open access textbooks? In this workshop you will learn about new Canadian-lead open access textbook repositories, and other open access textbook resources that are freely available on the web to use in your teaching. If you are interested in building your own open access textbook to use in your classroom, this workshop will provide you with the necessary building blocks to get started.
If you’ve ever tried to compete for the latest pair of Adidas designed by Kanye, or lusted after a Birkin bag that you’ll never be able to afford, then you are already familiar with the concept of artificial scarcity. Brands market high end goods as limited editions in order to drive up the price and the demand. It creates exclusivity and buzz around a product.
How, then, does this same marketing ploy weave its way through the world of information buying and selling? Isn’t online content as easy as a ‘click’ to access and share? How can a limit be placed on something that isn’t actually tangible? Leave it to the experts – the folks at Harvard Business Review (HBR) have managed to do exactly that.
Ryerson subscribes to HBR both in print and electronically via the EBSCO database, Business Source Elite. EBSCO has exclusive distribution rights for HBR. The HBR 500, as it’s come to be known in the information world, is a collection of the 500 most read HBR articles (as determined by HBR). In 2013, HBR made these articles “read only”, meaning they could no longer be used as course readings unless the library agreed to pay an outrageously priced supplemental fee, on top of existing subscription fees. This fee ranged from $10,000 to as high as $200,000. We chose not to pay. Sure, you can still find those articles via Business Source Elite, but you can’t link to them, download or print them.
Here’s a screenshot of what this actually looks like – a subtle barrier to access, but a barrier nevertheless:
Exclusivity when it comes to scholarly publications is bad for libraries and bad for students. It hinders access when we should be moving toward open access. It drives up prices for artificial reasons and creates further strain on library and university budgets. What works well in the commercial world is not necessarily contributing to the greater good. Altruistic though it may sound, librarians are on guard to monitor these tactics, lest they set precedents for the rest of the publishing sector.
Further reading:
Narayandas, Das. “Harvard Business Review Answers its Critics.” Financial Times. October 17, 2013.
After some delay, the Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications has been released. The policy requires that any peer-reviewed publication(s) arising from grants received from any of the three agencies (CIHR, NSERC, SSHRC) be made freely accessible within 12 months of publication. The new policy comes into force for any grants awarded after May 1st, 2015. It’s worth noting that CIHR has had an open access policy since 2008.
Researchers funded by any of these three agencies are required to either:
1) Publish in a journal that allows immediate open access or one that permits open access within 12 months of initial publication; and/or
2) Deposit the final, peer-reviewed author version of your article in an online open access repository, such as RULA’s Digital Repository.
It is important to note that option 2 does not require any payments to publishers, but option 1 might incur an open access article processing fee.
The Ryerson Library maintains deposit accounts, to cover open access charges, with PLoS, Biomed Central, and Hindawi. In addition, we accept applications for funding from other journals, subject to criteria outlined in our Open Access Author Fund policy page.
The Library’s Digital Media Experience Lab (the DME) opened on Monday and it’s been full of students ever since.
The DME is a library resource that aims to support student learning both within the classroom and as an extracurricular pursuit through workshops, peer tutoring, and one-on-one instruction. The goal of the DME is to help Ryerson students learn basic and advanced technology skill-sets while exposing them to new and emerging tech.
To introduce students to the DME, the team set up a “tech petting zoo” for the first-week kickoff. A Makey-Makey fruit piano and playable birds, a 3D printer in the midst of being built, and an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset drew crowds into the lab’s beautiful space on the 3rd floor of the Student Learning Centre.
Several students have already become DME regulars, lending their enthusiasm and expertise to help build the 3D printer, create new configurations for the Makey-Makeys, and set up new virtual reality experiences by connecting the Oculus Rift to a Leap Motion controller. On Thursday, the students taught Ryerson Chief Librarian Madeleine Lefebvre how to play chess using the system.
As more equipment continues to arrive, we fully expect that the space will continue to evolve to meet the needs of our creative, experimental, dedicated students!
